-PDF Download- Democracy For Busy People EBOOK

Democracy for Busy People

Author: Kevin J. Elliott

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0226826325

Advances an alternative approach to democratic reform that focuses on building institutions that empower people who have little time for politics. How do we make democracy more equal? Although in theory, all citizens in a democracy have the right to participate in politics, time-consuming forms of participation often advantage some groups over others. Where some citizens may have time to wait in long lines to vote, to volunteer for a campaign, to attend community board meetings, or to stay up to date on national, state, and local news, other citizens struggle to do the same. Since not all people have the time or inclination to devote substantial energy to politics, certain forms of participation exacerbate existing inequalities. Democracy for Busy People takes up the very real challenge of how to build a democracy that empowers people with limited time for politics. While many plans for democratic renewal emphasize demanding forms of political participation and daunting ideals of democratic citizenship, political theorist Kevin J. Elliott proposes a fundamentally different approach. He focuses instead on making democratic citizenship undemanding so that even busy people can be politically included. This approach emphasizes the core institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties, against deliberative reforms and sortition. Timely and action-focused, Democracy for Busy People is necessary reading.

Participation in America

Author: Sidney Verba

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1987-01-16

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0226852962

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Participation in America represents the largest study ever conducted of the ways in which citizens participate in American political life. Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie addresses the question of who participates in the American democratic process, how, and with what effects. They distinguish four kinds of political participation: voting, campaigning, communal activity, and interaction with a public official to achieve a personal goal. Using a national sample survey and interviews with leaders in 64 communities, the authors investigate the correlation between socioeconomic status and political participation. Recipient of the Kammerer Award (1972), Participation in America provides fundamental information about the nature of American democracy.

Democracy for Realists

Author: Christopher H. Achen

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1400888743

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Now with new analysis of the 2016 elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.

Power Without Knowledge

Author: Jeffrey Friedman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190877170

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Technocrats claim to know how to solve the social and economic problems of complex modern societies. But as Jeffrey Friedman argues in Power without Knowledge, there is a fundamental flaw with technocracy: it requires an ability to predict how the people whom technocrats attempt to control will act in response to technocratic policies. However, the mass public's ideas-the ideas that drive their actions-are far too varied and diverse to be reliably predicted. But that is not the only problem. Friedman reminds us that a large part of contemporary mass politics, even populist mass politics, is essentially technocratic too. Members of the general public often assume that they are competent to decide which policies or politicians will be able to solve social and economic problems. Yet these ordinary "citizen-technocrats" typically regard the solutions to social problems as self-evident, such that politics becomes a matter of vetting public officials for their good intentions and strong wills, not their technocratic expertise. Finally, Friedman argues that technocratic experts themselves drastically oversimplify technocratic realities. Economists, for example, theorize that people respond rationally to the incentives they face. This theory is simplistic, but it gives the appearance of being able to predict people's behavior in response to technocratic policy initiatives. If stripped of such gross oversimplications, though, technocrats themselves would be forced to admit that a rational technocracy is nothing more than an impossible dream. Ranging widely over the philosophy of social science, rational choice theory, and empirical political science, Power without Knowledge is a pathbreaking work that upends traditional assumptions about technocracy and politics, forcing us to rethink our assumptions about the legitimacy of modern governance.

Two Cheers for Democracy

Author: Edward Morgan Forster

Publisher: Mariner Books

Published: 1951

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A collection of poetical essays revealing the social conscience of the modern English novelist.

The People Vs. Democracy

Author: Yascha Mounk

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-03-05

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0674976827

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Uiteenzetting over de opkomst van het populisme en het gevaar daarvan voor de democratie.

Surviving Autocracy

Author: Masha Gessen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0593332245

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

Design as Democracy

Author: David de la Pena

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2017-12-07

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1610918479

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.

What Universities Owe Democracy

Author: Ronald J. Daniels

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1421442698

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Introduction -- American dreams : access, mobility, fairness -- Free minds : educating democratic citizens -- Hard facts : knowledge creation and checking power -- Purposeful pluralism : dialogue across difference on campus -- Conclusion.

Laboratories of Autocracy

Author: David Pepper

Publisher: St. Helena Press

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1662919581

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

“It’s the statehouses, stupid.” Laboratories of Autocracy shows that far more than the high-profile antics of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan—and yes, even bigger than Donald Trump’s "Big Lie”—it’s anonymous, often corrupt politicians in statehouses across the country who pose the greatest dangers to American democracy. Because these statehouses no longer operate as functioning democracies, these unknown politicians have all the incentive to keep doing greater damage, and can not be held accountable however extreme they get. This has driven steep declines in states like Ohio and others across the country. And collectively, it’s placed American democracy in its greatest peril since the dawn of the Jim Crow era. But Pepper doesn’t stop there. He lays out a robust pro-democracy agenda outlining how everyone from elected officials to business leaders to everyday citizens can fight back.